mrpiper said:

Well it wasn't $10,000 but it was $26,000.00 when it was new almost 30 years ago! ...

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I've never heard of that table maker before. What caused it to be that expensive when it was new? Solid rare hardwood?

Bavafongoul said:

IMO, a poorly conceived product. So when the balls don’t go thru, does it move or get knocked over? ...

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Just use two short pieces of dowel. Use a ball to judge how far to put them apart. You only knock over one of them for a bad shot, so it's clear which side you missed on.

But I think it's much, much better to just play a straight-in follow shot. The path of the cue ball tells you how well you hit the ball. Make it progressive, moving the cue ball farther and farther from the OB.

I think gadgets like in the OP are only useful if there is no other way to get a player to practice. I think projection systems fall into that category -- spending a thousand makes you feel guilty if you don't use it.

sjm said:

... Why are referees that lack the core knowledge to do the job being certified by WPA? Why does it seem that referees getting the most noteworthy assignments in pool are the ones making the most errors? Why doesn't WPA care about the precipitous decline in performance of referees in pool? ...

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Training referees is a hard job. In the particular case of The Pongers Push, the shot is rare and extreme, and it could easily have never been included explicitly in whatever training the referee received. It is one thing to know the words of the rule and a very different thing to see an extreme case of it in action and be required to make the correct call quickly.

As far as judging good/bad hits by the action of the balls, that's also hard and complicated. Many players don't understand how to apply two successive cases of the 90-degree rule, and that applies to some refs as well.

But I have heard that some officials are not interested in the details of how the physics works, even to the level of being able to correctly judge the WC8B shot and they do not see why referees should learn such things. Just make a call -- no need to think. That's a problem.

I've seen several "Good hit?" posts on Facebook. The votes are often split 50-50 even though the call looks obvious to me. When the correct voters comment about why they voted that way, they are usually wrong or confused.

skogstokig said:

big house?

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It ain’t a row house in the slums.. why do we think you have to a have a multi million dollar LeBron James level mansion be successful in life? Spoiler alert.. you don’t

skogstokig said:

god holds it down but also on the flat earth people don't live upside down in the opposite part of the earth

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So gravity can do it but "god" can't... got it.

Bob Jewett said:

You don't understand how high-stakes pool gambling works. Both players win. The stakehorses are slaughtered for their meat. Sadly, in California, it's against the law to eat horses. Really. It nearly got into the state constitution.

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Not sure why you would say "sadly". Legislation banning slaughtering horses stems largely stems from horse trainers selling horses for meat rather than seeing them through minor injuries, as well as theft of horses from individuals (read as: their pets) so they can be sold for meat. Since horse slaughter is often done in Mexico, bordering states such as California tend to be the most affected. The perps often tell the horse owners that their little girl's pony is going to a nice farm upstate, when they are actually off to Tijuana.

A couple of decades ago, Bo Derek was on the California Racing Commission, and I believe this was one of her causes. The problem was rampant then, hopefully things are better now.

And now back to pool....